Biomedicine on Display

Pharmaceutical drugs — especially late 20th century drugs — is a pretty challenging topic for medical museums because of the limited variety of material artefacts available for display.

Vials, capsules, tablets, bottles, cartons and prescriptions look much the same; nor are they among the most evocative kinds of artefacts. Curators have to work hard to compensate for the lack of ‘innate’ presence effects in most objects related to pharmaceutical drugs.

It’s not impossible, of course. Images can do the trick, and so can the pills themselves, if arranged in an innovative way. The ‘Cradle to Grave’ installation in British Museum’s Wellcome Gallery was a revelation when it was first shown in 2003 because it blew new life into these otherwise so non-evocative objects by relating them to the audience’s existential imagination.

In other words, much can be achieved by mobilizing imaginative concepts and ideas. The workshop on ’Drugs, Standards, and Chronic Illness’ to be held in Manchester, 27-28 November 2009, could be a source of inspiration for how to conceptualize an exhibition on drugs. Says the CFP:

Non-communicable illnesses such as … cancer and cardiovascular disease and the role that the development and marketing of treatments for chronic illness have played in the broader history of standardization in medicine will be the central theme of this workshop. The histories of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable illnesses have much in common, but there are important differences between them that are worth exploring. Many of the blockbuster drugs of the last 50 years have been developed for the treatment of cardiovascular disorders. In the course of this development, some illnesses have been transformed from acute to chronic (e.g. malignant hypertension) and it has become acceptable to treat physiological parameters that do not cause symptoms but are statistically associated with illness later in life (e.g. mild hypertension or hypercholesterolaemia). In contrast, and with few exceptions, cancer drugs have often been used to treat what might otherwise be considered as orphan diseases and have rarely been as commercially profitable as cardiovascular drugs. Nevertheless, cancer has been central to the development of many of the practices, such as testing, clinical research, and standardization, which are increasingly applied to other fields of medicine, above all the multi-centre randomised clinical trial.

The meeting will be organized around four main analytical points:

• the management of risk and efficacy
• the structure of biomedical research: laboratories, clinics, protocols
• market conceptualisation, market realities, sales and uses
• regulatory frameworks and regulatory practices

Possible themes include: comparisons, e.g. between different illnesses or across different national contexts; issues surrounding notions of the chronic and the acute or the relationship between risk and disease; spaces of drug administration, from inpatient to outpatient departments; institutional developments; the meaning of ‘chemotherapy’ in different contexts; regulatory institutions, policies and practices; the consumption of medicines, the role of patients and patient organizations, and questions of gender; the establishment of standards, etc.

Send less than 500 words abstracts to Carsten Timmermann (carsten.timmermann@manchester.ac.uk) and Viviane Quirke (vquirke@brookes.ac.uk) before 3 April 2009, More info here.

We are currently preparing a small exhibit on the culture and history of proteins and protein research, which is planned to open Friday 4 september in connection with the official opening of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.

The aim of the exhibition — which shall be placed in the main hall of the Faculty of Health Sciences’s Panum building on U Copenhagen North Campus (right at the entrance to the new eco-friendly and health-promoting canteen) — is to give a historical and cultural perspective on the current focus on proteins in biomedicine and biotechnology.

We want to create an object-rich exhbition, and therefore we would like to get in contact with laboratory and clinical scientists on the Øresund area who may provide us with objects, images and documents (for loan or as gifts) from the last 50 years, which can illustrate research on or clinical use of proteins: measuring instruments, separation equipment, images from laboratory environments, posters, and so forth.

We are especially interested in everyday laboratory and clinical objects, like paper electrophoresis strips, gels, blotting membranes, immunoprecipition plates — in other words, things which laboratory workers usually throw out, but which give a good feeling of how protein research is done in practice. Call or write me (see address here).

To stimulate your imagination with a (more than 50 years old) thing — here are two iconic artefacts in the history of protein research: two vial bottles of raw insulin from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo from around 1935. Insulin was the first purified protein with a well-defined therapeutic purpose and it was also the first protein to be sequenced (in 1955 by Frederick Sanger; Nobel Prize in 1958).

(the vials are from Novo Nordisk’s collection of historical objects)

No biomedical lab could function without pipettes — the ‘containment of precision-measured transfer of liquids between containers’, as I use to think of them.

Everyone who has a crush on pipettes (and I tell you, there are many of us, as you can see in this Eppendorf video) will just love the new blog Labtutorials in biology.

Created by Bálint Bálint (a junior lecturer at the University of Debrecen), this blog is meant to become a teaching aid for basic biochemical and molecular biology lab practices. The first post was on water, the second is about (YES!) pipettes. All sorts of them. Scroll down the post, and more and more different kinds of pipettes, in still images and videos, appear.

Bálint’s next post will be about serological pipettes. Stay seriously tuned!

(Thanks to Berci for the tip)

Wellcome Film (which is part of the Wellcome Library in London) announces the launch of their own YouTube channel (see more here), Very nice initiative — but how do you get access to the movies???

Added 9pm: Aha, here they are: http://www.youtube.com/user/WellcomeFilm (couldn’t find the link on their website, but found it via YouTube)

The quest for bringing new and unexplored areas of human life and practice under the conceptual reign of the arts and humanities is endless. For example, the “very short conference” organized by Tate Modern (?) on 20 June — on the theme of shortness:

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations. Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

Sounds like the perfect conference (it will only last a few hours). The organizers invite submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the “very long dinner” after the conference.

The complete list of medical historical or museological topics which I can think of in this context is extremely short but impressive, for example:

• a short history of short-term memory
• dielectric relaxation of short molecules — a science studies perspective
• episodic museum displays of shortening telomers in ageing rats.

Period.

Send a max 200 word abstract (why so long?) + a max 100 short bio to short.at.tate@googlemail.com before 20 March. More here.

The announcement is from here — it’s not on Tate Modern’s website yet, so it may be a hoax — let’s wait and see :-)

Historians of medicine are grudgingly beginning to acknowledge the changing media habits in the population — that is, why read a book or a journal article when you can see a streaming video on the web instead?

To prepare the scholarly community for the new media age, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is organizing a workshop on ’History of Medicine in Motion’, Tuesday 26 May 2009:

The internet is rapidly transforming the boundaries of what is considered serious scholarly material, and allowing for a broader dissemination of findings than has hitherto been possible in history. The increased video saturation among new generation of students has been both a cause for alarm and excitement among academics as they note the decreased attention span of students for print literature on the one hand, and the potential for making their materials more immediately accessible on the other.

Grad students and university staff are invited to submit 3-5 minute video clips and podcasts on any subject within the history of medicine. The workshop will be led by Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard), Hal Cook (UCL) and Asher Tlalim (National Film and Television School). For those who don’t know how to make movies there will also be a one-day training session on 6 March, where participants will learn to use iMovie, Keynote and Garageband.

Excellent inititative. My only caveat: it’s not just ‘new generations of students’ who are changing their media habits; many old hawks like me are also saturated with new media.

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments for sale, etc., but otherwise all messages for academic and museum purposes are welcome. To join, send a blank message to rete-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

(thanks to Gustav for the tip)

Looks like this blog — together with some 1700 other health-related blogs — has been taken advantage of by WellSphere (see the ugly little banner at the bottom of the right column), which has now been sold to HealthCentral Network. Read more about their copyright scam in this well-researched post on BetterHealth. In principle they seem to own the copyright of everything we’ve posted here since last September. Better be more careful next time one gets mails from a former Stanford physician (Geoff Rutledge) turned CMIO in an internet company.

Tilli Tansey — historian of contemporary medicine, a specialist in oral history, and the prime mover behind the famous Wellcome Witness Seminar series — will give her inaugural lecture as newly appointed professor at UCL on Monday 9 March 2009 @ 6.30 pm (Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre, London). The lecture is titled ’Models and Mechanisms: Aspects of Biomedicine at UCL in the Twentieth Century’ and will be followed by a reception in the Roberts Foyer.

Just a reminder about the 10th annual UNIVERSEUM Network meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, 2009, which we announced a few months ago. The second call emphasis the following topics of interest:

• enhancing and promoting knowledge about European university museums, collections and archives
• preserving and documenting contemporary science and humanities in universities
• European projects for the study and increased access to university heritage

Proposals of max. 200 words to Catherine Gadon (universeum09@adm.ups-tlse.fr) 31 March. For further info, see www.ups-tlse.fr/universeum09 or www.universeum.it.

A perfect set of topics for us here at Medical Musieon — except for the fact that we have scheduled the opening of our new exhibition, ‘Split & Splice’, for Thursday 11 June. Maybe one or two of us could go to Toulouse on the 12th and 13th?

Just received a reminder about nominations for this year’s Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits.

The award was established in 1985 to recognize excellence in museums and museum exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry, and engineering to the general public.

The jury pays special attention to good design and production, of course, but also to whether the exhibition raises pertinent historical issues: “Artifacts and images should be used in a manner that interests, teaches, and stimulates both the general public and historians”.

Deadline for nominations is 1 April; then the award committee choses a shortlist of finalists, the exhibition is reviewed on site, and finally the lucky winner gets a plaque and up to $1,000 to cover expenses for a curator to accept the award at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) awards banquet in the autumn.

It’s high time for historians and curators of medical technology and medical engineering to make their work visible in this award context. Because not a single one of the winning exhbitions of the last 15 years have related to the history of medical technology and medical engineering (see the list here)!

Why? Either the Dibner Award jurys haven’t acknowledged medical technology and engineering as part of the field (which I find hard to believe). Or curators of medical technology and engineering haven’t produced any interesting exhibitions. Or what?

Apropos Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP synthase: visual artist Luke Jerram and glassblower Brian Jones have created these two non-coloured glass sculptures of the smallpox virus.

The artwork is based on a number of scientific representations of the virus, and is made in consultation with virologist Andrew Davidson at the University of Bristol.

(top right image from here, below from here)

Luke Jerram’s artwork coincides with the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, which was once one of the most dreaded epidemic diseases but which is now an ‘extinct’ species (except for some live virus strains in ‘virological gardens’).

There is a more interesting aspect to these sculptures than mere memorialization, however. Luke, who defines himself as “a colour blind installation artist, who fuses his artistic sculptural practice with his scientific and perceptual studies”, says that they were

designed for contemplation and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena.

Similarly: before doing these sculptures, Luke — who is right now artist in residence with FACT in Liverpool — made avian flu virus and HIV sculptures, also together with virologists. The HIV sculpture work, now in the Wellcome Collection, London, was his response, he says, to the constant bombardment with coloured images of viruses in the media:

Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial colouring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like. How many people believe a virus to be bright red and yellow? (quoted from here)

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine — and also its use for science communicative purposes — is a vast and very interesting topic, which would be worth an independent research project (cf this PhD project). What is its epistemic value, if any? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception? How are colour conventions negotiated? What kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t?

Wayne Clough, the new head of the Smithsonian Institution, wants to change the venerable museum institution: “We need to make our collections, talented scholars and other resources accessible worldwide by providing additional platforms and vehicles for educating and inspiring large audiences,” he said to yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, and added:

Our job is to authenticate and inform the significance of the collections, not to control access to them. It is no longer acceptable for us to share only 1% of our 137 million specimens and artifacts in an age when the Internet has made it possible to share it all. In doing this, the relevance of the Smithsonian to education can be magnified many times over.

Museums all over the world are facing a similar challenge. Most of us have difficulties meeting it, because we lack the resources to digitalize our collections. But when the brain of the colossus speaks there may be a chance that museum authorities in other countries begin to listen. 

The new signals from the Smithsonian have everything to do with the fact that Wayne Clough is the former president of Georgia Tech and thus sees the importance of technological solutions to the outreach problem in museums. I guess that’s why he was selected for the job in the first place! Clough was also one of the prime movers behind Smithsonian’s recent museum 2.0-conference.

(thanks to Suzanne Fischer — or rather her Twitter post — for the tip)

The Institute for Cultural Inquiry/Kulturlabor and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are opening the exhibition ‘Hothouse Archives’ by visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker tomorrow at 7pm. In one of the photo suites, “Laboratory Life”,

several layers of images are superimposed on top of one another in the form of a palimpsest. Images garnered from scientific laboratories form the technological base layer. An image of a transparent garden is then transferred as a top layer. The chance provokes questions concerning our enchantment with both nature and technology.

The show is open until 6 March 2008 in the library of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry on Christinenstrasse 18/19. More info here.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

Except for a 2,5 ECTS credit course in medical science and technology studies, we don’t have any obligatory teaching here at Medical Museion.

But we attract several medical students who want to use their 5th/6th year elective essay (10 ECTS credits) to go deeper into the history of medicine and medical humanities.

Here’s Jesper discussing the history of lobotomy with a medical student under the PH-lamp in the staff lunch room (the best supervision venue in the whole museum):